BCLA Readers' Advisory Interest Group

Non-Fiction’s Caped Crusader

As a passionate non-fiction reader I seldom, if ever, get asked to recommend non-fiction. Generally, my patrons rarely consider reading non-fiction for pleasure. Non-fiction is real and this makes the reading doubly enthralling.

A college kid who steals moon rocks from NASA? Sounds like a great idea for a book, and even more so given that it actually happened: check out Ben Mezrich’s Sex on the Moon. A Barcelona chicken farmer, who fooled the Nazis, saved D-Day and became the greatest secret agent ever?That would make a great read, and it does in Stephan Talty’sbook Agent Garbo.

Whenever a patron asks for a recommendation I’m confident that a title from my go-to list will rope them into the non-fiction world, as it has for one of my regulars, who always asks me, “What have you got for me this week?” And here is my go-to list. There’s more, a lot more, but these are some of my favorites: